Pictures of Hermaphrodites and Famous Examples in History

The first hermaphrodite picture was created in 1860, when French photographer Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, otherwise known as Nadar, took nine photographs of a young person with a male build and stature, but who might have identified as female. These are considered the first hermaphrodite human pictures in the world, and were reserved only for medical uses. These photographs were never published in mainstream media.

What Is a Hermaphrodite?

A person who is a hermaphrodite has both female and male genital characteristics and can also be called intersex people. This typically means that the organs on the inside are of one sex, while the organs on the outside are of another sex; for example, a hermaphrodite might have a penis and testicles, but inside, there are ovaries and possibly a uterus. In more rare cases, the chromosomes say a person is male or female, but the genitals say otherwise.

Only occasionally do hermaphrodites actually exhibit the genitalia of both a male and a female; for example, a person might have a penis as well as a vagina. In many of these cases, the doctors aren’t sure which genitalia the person has at birth: For instance, a female might appear to have a very large clitoris, or a male might appear to have a very small penis. This ambiguous genitalia is often cause for further testing on DNA to determine whether the child is a boy or a girl.

It is currently estimated that about one in every 2,000 babies born have “confusing” or ambiguous genitalia. In cases like this, the parents might make the decision to put their child through surgery to determine a physical gender, or they might opt to wait until the child is older and can decide for themselves which gender is dominant in their body and mind.

Hermaphrodite Human Pictures

Below are some pictures to show what Hermaphrodite looks like in humans as well as art works based on it. The previous 4 pictures were photography works by Nadar as explained at the very beginning.

Famous Hermaphrodite People—Most of Them Went Through Surgery

Hermaphrodite human pictures are shown above. Some famous people have been hermaphrodites, but hermaphrodite human people for them are not available. Here are ten of them that you might recognize:

Maddie Blaustein: a voice actor in several video games, including Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon, and the founder of the popular “Second Life.”

Lisa Lee Dark: A Welsh actress and voice performer, she was raised as a boy because doctors didn’t realize she was biologically female. Sent to an all-boys school, she was badly bullied because she didn’t act the way a boy was expected to act.

Gottlieb Gottlich: A man who was one of the very first medical subjects to be studied for genital confusion. He was raised as a female but in his 30s began having severe abdominal pains; the investigation led to determining that he was actually male.

Sarah Gronert: This retired tennis player won a total of ten titles. She was born with both male and female genitalia; upon surgery at the age of 19, she is now considered physically and biologically to be a woman.

Iain Morland: A music technologist and author from England, he is a leading academic in the field of sex research. He was subject to numerous surgeries throughout his childhood in order to determine his gender.

Dee Palmer. The former keyboardist for band Jethro Tull, Palmer was once known as David Palmer. Assigned as a female at birth, she went through numerous surgeries. After her wife died in 1995, she began to focus more on her intersex questions.

Veronique Renard: A visual artist and author, she was diagnosed with Klinefelter’s syndrome in her teens, and chose to transition to a female. She became the youngest woman in the world to go through complete gender reassignment surgery.

Caster Semenya: A world champion and South African distance runner, she was subjected to gender testing in 2009 after winning the World Championship. This was one of the first widely-known cases of gender testing in the athletic world and led to an uproar among medical professionals and athletes alike.

Erik Schinegger: A skier who won many awards, he was originally known as female, but a medical test before the 1968 Olympics revealed that he was actually male. He chose to transition to life as a man, and eventually married and became a father.

Caroline Cossey: Once a “Bond girl” in the James Bond films, she was raised as a male but had a female appearance. At the age of 17, she chose to transition to life as a woman. She had gender reassignment surgery and was eventually “outed” by tabloids as being raised as male.